About the Data
We scraped information about the top 500 billionaires of the world
for the years 2011 to 2019 and 2021 from Areppim. Areppim is an information
website that provides and analyses various kinds of data. It has
collected data from Forbes
Billionaire List for data before 2019 and Bloomberg Billionaires
Index after 2019 (and including).
The variables extracted are as follows:
- Name
- Age
- Citizenship
- factor of countries
- Person’s citizenship
- Net Worth
- numeric
- The total market value of the assets removing the value of the
liabilities associated to a person or an entity.
- Source of Wealth
- factor
- The wealth was acquired from what kind of industry. The industries
have been grouped in the following categories:
- Commodities
- Consumer
- Diversified
- Energy
- Entertainment
- Finance
- Food and Beverage
- Health Care
- Industrial
- Media and Telecom
- Real Estate
- Retail
- Services
- Technology
The data consists of 500 rows across 10 years, thus, 5000 data points
with 5 variables along with ordering indicating the rank.
We also have additional variables for every country for 2021:
- Population
- GDP
- Population Density
- GDP Growth Rate
and for every billionaire:
To create the world map plots, we also created a data frame with the
variables:
This data frame consists of 64 countries, the countries which had at
least one billionaire in top 500 over the 10 years.
Obtaining the Data
The data was obtained from the following sources:
- Main Data scraping from Areppim: Link
- Added Ages in the 2019 and 2021 datasets using Wikipedia pages of
various billionaires.
- A csv was used from World Bank for data about various
countries: Link
- A csv to obtain ISO country codes: Link
Look at obtaining_data.html
in the Code folder for the code of scraping and processing
the data.
Biases in the Data:
Bias in Methodology: We have scraped the data of
2011 to 2021 (except 2020) from Areppim
website where it was mentioned that the data they are presenting was
taken from Bloomberg Billionaires Index from 2019 and
previously from Forbes Billionaires List.
The methodology of data collection of Forbes and Bloomberg
is different.
Date of data collection of those websites was also different for
those two websites. Since, the wealth of a person varies daily, some
bias may have been introduced by this.
Bias in Categories of Source of Income: The
sources of wealth have been categorized under 14 categories. At times, a
source of income could have belonged to two or more categories, in that
case, the most relevant category was chosen.
Interesting Questions
Which industry should be chosen to become a Billionaire?
Which place produces the most Billionaires?
Who are the top 10 billionaires in different years?
What is the distribution of Net worth among top 500
Billionaires?
In what way has the wealth of the top 10 richest people changed
in the pandemic?
What is the distribution of age of the Billionaires?
What is the relation between Number of Billionaires and
Population?
What is the relation between Number of Billionaires and
GDP?
What is the relation between Billionaires Last change YTD and GDP
Growth Rate?
Important Visualisations
Which industry to choose to become a
Billionaire?

Finance
and Retail were the wealthiest industries until
Technology overtook them in the recent years.
And
the Total Net Worth of the Technology increased
exponentially in the 2019-21 period.
Which place produces the most Billionaires?



China
and United States have higher number of billionaires
and higher Total Worth than Europian countries.
However, the Europian countries have higher Average Net Worth.
Africa had the
least number of billionaires.
Top 10 Billionaires Race:

Everyone’s net
worth has increased over the years.
Elon
Musk and Jeff Bezos jumped to the top positions in the recent years
pushing Bill Gates down, with Elon Musk showing an exponential jump over
the last 2 years.
Distribution of Net worth among top 500
Billionaires:

The
Net Worth decreases exponentially as we go to the higher
ranks.
Even
among the top 500, the maximum wealth is congested among the few highest
billionaires.
Wealth of worlds 10 richest Doubled in
Pandemic

A
1.5-2 times jump can be seen in just a span of 2 years during the covid
era.
Distribution of age of the Billionaires:


The
ages of the top 500 billionaires has roughly remain the same for last 10
years.
Most of them belong
to 40-80 age group.
Relation between Billionaires and their Country’s
Data

There
seems to be no significant relation between Number of Billionaires and
Population of the Country.

There
seems to be a positive corelation between Number of Billionaires and
GDP.

There
seems to be no relation between Billionaires last change YTD and
GDPGR.
So,
the positive correlation between Number of Billionaires and GDP was
fully superficial
Male vs Female billionaires of the World
Out of the
top billionaires, only 12.9% are women.
Male and Female Distribution


The
female representation in the worlds’ billionaires has been increasing
over the past years.
Food
and beverages, and Fasion and Retail have the highest proportion of
females.
Conclusion
The answers to the posed questions are purely data-driven based on
the visualizations. The highlights of our analysis were:
- Technology industry has had a huge jump in the 2019-21 period along
with Elon Musk in the global ranking.
- As it turns out, having a high number of billionaires or a high
total net worth in a country doesn’t guarantee one would have the
highest net worth there.
- Even among the Top 500, the Top 20-25 are the actually the most
wealthy with much higher net worth as compared to others being
ranked.
- In the period 2019-21, the Net Worth of the Top 20-25 has become
1.5-2 times.
- The Age range of 40-80 years has remained static over the years, and
data doesn’t indicate any change in this trend.
- There was no relation found between GDP of the country or the
population with the Number or the Net Worth of the billionaires.
- Women representation remains low in the Top billionaires of the
world.
- The proportion of women in the billionaires list has been increasing
over the past 10 years.
References
- Sources of our Data:
- Areppim
- Wikipedia
- World Bank
- Some Visualisations
- Male v/s Female in Top Billionaires
- Male and Female Distribution
- Took help form: